This invention is in the field of rotary lawn mowers having safety blades and mulchers. A number of patents have been granted on rotary lawn mowers and particularly have been directed to flexible rod blades which will cut the grass while at the same time not break on impact with an object such as a rock. For example, in the U.S. Pat. No. 4,065,913, a rotary lawn mower is disclosed having a rotatable disc with a plurality of radially extending rods. A somewhat similar device is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,303,637 wherein the rods are attached to the output drive shaft of the motor with the rods being in a closed loop configuration. Another patent disclosing a closed looped rod configuration for a rotary lawn mower is the U.S. Pat. No. 3,208,209 which also discloses alternate embodiments including radially extending rods. The cutting rods used in the prior art devices typically are flexible in order to prevent breakage of the rod when impacting an immovable object. For example, the U.S. Pat. No. 3,444,674 discloses rods which bend backward upon operation adjacent to a barb wire fence. In lieu of utilizing flexible rods, some rotary lawn mowers have been provided with pivoting blades such as shown in the U.S. Pat. No. 3,203,161.
Disclosed herein is a new and improved rotary lawn mower having rotating cutting rods which extend outwardly in a nonradial direction in contrast to the prior cutters having rods extending in a radial direction. Several advantages result by arranging the cutting rods to extend in a nonradial direction relative to the axis of rotation. First, the rod impacts the upstanding grass at such an angle so as to provide a slicing cut in lieu of the straight-through cut existing in the prior cutters. Further, an inwardly directed force is applied to the cut grass so as to limit the normal outward flow of the grass thereby insuring that the grass is impacted by subsequent cutting rods. Further advantages include the low cost of the structure disclosed herein as compared to the prior devices and the fact that the structure disclosed herein may be easily repaired by the simple removal and reinsertion of new cutting rods.